Meet Jim Barton, the new CEO of Santa Monica Aerospace. Jim's job won't be easy: the company's hemorrhaging cash, struggling to regain investors' trust after an accounting scandal, and striving to transform its culture to become a more global competitor. In this course, you’ll travel with Jim as he takes on leadership challenges ranging from strategy execution, to inspiring people, to maintaining an ethical approach. Experts agree that twentieth-century leadership practices are inadequate for the stormy twenty-first-century present. This provocative course equips you with the insights you'll need to rise with the occasion of a rapidly shifting business landscape. The course is based on a book, Harder Than I Thought: Adventures of a 21st Century Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O'Donnell, published by Harvard Business Review Press. Purchase of the book is optional. If you want more information about the book or wish to buy it, see https://hbr.org/product/harder-than-i-thought-adventures-of-a-twenty-first/an/10332-HBK-ENG or http://www.amazon.com/Harder-Than-Thought-Adventures-Twenty-First/dp/1422162591 After taking the course, you'll be able to: o Enact your own personal leadership approach, derived from your ongoing evaluation of how Jim Barton has handled his leadership situation, as well as from established leadership concepts and frameworks; o Avoid leadership actions that might have worked in the past, but are not suited to a newly challenging 21st century world; o Navigate treacherous new 21st century leadership challenges, such as greater reliance on specialized workers or the need to respond to external scrutiny in an increasingly transparent world (and many more); o Avoid "slippery slope" ethical failures, and think more clearly about the separation between public and private life for a 21st century leader.

Making decisions in today's world, a world increasing in complexity, with broad changes and uncertainty, creates the need of approaches that allow us to discern the real problems and the causes that create them. Identifying these problems, in most cases, requires challenging the assumptions on which we base our judgments, regarding the world and its realities. Critical thinking could be defined, as "that way of thinking - on any subject, content or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his thinking by seizing the inherent structures of the act of thinking and by subjecting them to intellectual standards". Critical thinking helps making decisions within a company, selecting the best action for the organization. In this course of critical thinking the students will learn the tendencies, approximations and assumptions on which their reflections are based, and the conditions and the outcomes derived from their ways of thinking. This reflective thought is the active, careful and persistent examination of all beliefs in the light of the fundamentals that support them and their conclusions. The reasoned decisions that the world requires, occur in many different areas, especially in business decisions, related to strategies, in the solution of problems in organizations, in the solution of social problems and in corporations’ social and ethical responsibility. In this online course the approaches will be oriented to analyze the critical thinking required in these areas.

To successfully lead major projects you have to understand typical investor and project financing approaches. In this course, you’ll learn to interpret some key contractual instruments that are relevant for the financing of major engineering projects so that you are in a position to ensure the financially secure delivery of your project. You’ll explore the concept of “time value of money” and be able to compute key indicators such as “Pay-back time”, “Net Present value” and “Internal Rate of Return”. You’ll identify common stakeholder and management approaches, and be able to implement key messaging, take accurate requirements and manage expectations. Through real-life case studies, you’ll identify appropriate best practices related to governance, execution strategies, requirements management, procurement, asset and risk management and organisational design and development for the successful delivery of large engineering projects. This course explores concepts analysed in the University’s Online MSc in Engineering Management. If you are interested to develop your skills further, take a look at our online degree.

The Critical Path Method (CPM) is a popular methodology used by project managers and those that manage project schedules. This approach to sequencing and managing projects is highly sought after due to its ability to focus resources and streamline efforts to complete projects where time is of the utmost importance. In this project, learners will learn about the Critical Path Method. They will learn about how to calculate values such as Early Start, Late Start, Early Finish, Late Finish, Float, Duration, and the critical path itself. Learners will learn how to use Excel to create spreadsheets and diagrams that will act as calculators of the values used to determine the Critical Path. Then, learners will adapt these spreadsheets into Tableau. They will learn to create charts that display project duration, Gantt Charts as well as Abacus style charts. Finally, they will learn how to analyze these visualizations to answer project management questions.

Now more than ever, people need access to data to gain insights and make quick business decisions. Some of the world's top organizations choose Tableau to help teams organize, visualize, and analyze data to drive better results while saving time and reducing costs. Adding Tableau Public to your skillset will put you ahead of the curve in the current job market, aid in professional growth, and yield better business results. 'Tableau Public for project management and beyond' guided project is for anyone who wants to quickly get hands-on experience with the public version of Tableau business intelligence software. If you are preparing for Project Management certification, completing this project will be complementary to your knowledge. By the end of the project, you will have a foundational knowledge of Tableau Public and will learn how to build and analyze charts, create dashboards, and share your data insights online. There are no prerequisites to take this guided project.

Have you ever been in a healthcare waiting room and thought about how the organization could be more efficient? For example, have you found yourself thinking about how to reduce the amount of time spent waiting? Or do you work in a healthcare organization and find yourself thinking about how to improve the organization? If you have, this course is for you. Course content includes an overview of healthcare organizations, their administration and management, and their governance. The course provides links to external sites to connect you to the larger "real world" of healthcare organizations. The links also serve as resources you can take with you after you complete the course experience. And because everyone loves a road trip/field trip, there are also "virtual field trips" to the often hidden places of interest on the web. The course format is readings, videos, quizzes, and an electronic poster project. The poster project requires you to synthesize course material to design a healthcare organization and governance structure the way you would have things run in the best of all worlds. The electronic poster file is an artifact of the course which you can circulate to colleagues or use for a talk or presentation event.

Why do so many brilliant plans fail to deliver? What do you have to do to make things happen and make things right in services companies or service areas? Our teams require a new structured operational mindset that unifies improvement, promised service delivery and financial results. Just in time, Lean, Agile, Design Thinking... Are these movements familiar to you? Professor Muñoz-Seca has developed a framework that goes beyond these approaches: SPDM (Service Problem Driven Management) makes knowledge the corner stone of service efficiency and excellence. This new operational service structure is created to make your team overcome constant challenges and feel deeply involved in your service delivery. SPDM introduces a "magic formula" complementing these movements. Task equals problem equals knowledge, becomes the driving force to free up time to adopt new value-added tasks that improve both service efficiency, your team fulfillment and the company financial results. In this course, you will follow four companies, each in a different service sector (finance, gas service delivery, back office of a bank and tourism), as they implement SPDM to address the problems that do not allow them to deliver an excellent service and improve their results. Through these cases, and the application of this practical framework, you will gain a deep understanding of how to increase your efficiency and adopt a cutting-edge operations model that provides a 5 star service linked with financial improvement.

Understand Kanban Production Control Model Discrete Event Simulations Using R Simmer Capture Simulation Data, Plot Charts & Interpret Results

Modern organisations are characterised by increasingly higher levels of uncertainty, complexity and diversity. In our current globalised work environment, how can you manage the power and politics that persistently influence organisational decision-making? Being savvy about organisational politics and having the nous to negotiate and resolve conflict is a critical capability for managers at all levels. This course will develop your negotiation and conflict resolution skills – crucial to becoming a positive influence in your organisation. Via structured learning activities (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts and written assessments) you will conceptualise and measure power and politics; analyse and develop strategies for influencing stakeholders; and learn how to act with integrity and purpose when ‘playing politics’.

In this course, you will develop and strengthen your capacity to lead and recognize leadership exhibited by others in your organization. The professional business skills related to leadership gained through this course will help you to succeed working in any organization.